So I have this 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 that I’ve had laying around and I wanted to put my old Nvidia 1030 into it, along with Windows 10 for a newer (stronger?) home machine.
So I burnt the downloadable ISO from Microsoft onto a DVD, tried to boot it up and got this:
Ignore the microwave…
I got stuck at this “Select CD-ROM Boot Type : ” prompt, which you can’t type anything into. Apparently it’s a common and known issue with 64bit boot code, as the older Intel Apple Mac’s are of course 32bit only. So there is a fix, you have to use something called “oscdimg” to rebuild the ISO with a 32bit friendly loader.
So first I just used 7zip to extract the downloaded ISO, and then create the new 32bit ISO with the following:
Now what about those special ‘bootcamp’ drivers? Obviously under Windows 10 there is no nice way to get the ones you want. And what about which model/download package to get?
Then I found Brigadier!
It’ll probe your hardware type and grab the drivers for you!
While building the latest DOSBox SVN using Visual Studio 2003 I found something kind of annoying under Windows 10. The first thing is that if I search through the source code base, the application locks up, hard. It turns out that this has been an ongoing issue with Windows 8 (maybe Vista/7?) with Aero rendering of all things. The fix is to disable Desktop Compositing & Desktop Themes, but the application comparability tab is hidden on many applications for Windows 10.
Broken Visual Studio
See how the application preview doesn’t render anything at all? This is the hint that it’s broken. I think it may be worth sharing this ‘fix’ as I’m sure that other applications that behave strangely have the same issue.
Which, will run Visual Studio as Administrator allowing you to debug, and disable all the Aero assists for the application allowing things like search to work again.
I had gone further and enabled the Windows XP SP3 compatibility settings, however on doing a clean build I was presented with this error:
fatal error C1033: cannot open program database ''
Which I never could find any good source on what caused it, other than by guessing to remove the Windows XP flag, and now I’m able to build.
While debugging and re-building the debug database is held open on Windows 7 (maybe Vista?) and beyond on x64 based OS’s. You’ll get the annoying LNK1201 error.
In order to do a full build of DOSBox I had to re-build SDL, SDL-net, zLib, libPNG, and set them to a common C runtime linker setting to get a build where the final link didn’t complain. However when it came to existing project files I did have to find some older Visual C++ 6.0 stuff for many of the components, but using those I was able to ‘upgrade’ them to the 2003 environment and produce a working set.
I’ve got to say, that the AVI capture in the newer branches (I’m using build r4177) is really great!
One of my favorite things about VMware is that it can run itself. This allows me to test & stage new setups, test API stuff on my desktop, allowing me to build a “micro data center” that I don’t need to ask & beg for permission to take down, or if I do something stupid, I’m just a quick revert away from putting it back, and more importantly not making other people mad.
This also let’s me step back in time, in this case to the dark & ancient world of 2005, where I’d first deployed VMware ESX 2.5.2 along with vCenter 1.3.1 . I figured that I could use my ancient Dell P490, as I’d been using it as a desktop at home for casual use, but this seemed like a good thing to stress the system on. Also handy to have is the installation guide, which VMware still has online.
I installed Windows 10 Pro, and VMware Player 12.5.9, The box has a single physical processor that is dual core, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB disk. Not exactly a high end machine, but it’ll suffice.
The first thing to do was install ESX 2.5.2, I’d set it up as a Linux VM, with 1 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 3 disks, one for the OS, another for SWAP, and a Data store / Data disk.
After the nice GUI setup is completed we are dumped to a console on reboot. ESX is meant to be managed remotely.
Once the OS installed, edit the VMX file, and make the following changes, to allow VMware to setup the passthrough capabilities so the VM can run other VMs.
Now the Version will report that it’s VMware ESX. The other thing you’ll find out quickly is that you need a browser to manage the server (funny how things went back to this direction, later versions relied entirely on the ‘fat’ .NET client), and I found that FireFox 1.5 works the best.
The .NET client requires .NET 1.1 to operate correctly. It will not install on Windows 10 by default, as the .NET 3.5 (which includes .NET 2.0 runtime) is not acceptable, it has to be the 1.1 runtime, along with the J# runtime, which it’ll install if needed. I went through the installation steps in the aptly name ‘Installing .NET 1.1 on Windows 10‘. post.
Of course you’ll need a place to run the vCenter server, I just setup a Windows 2000 server, installed SQL 2000, .NET v1.0 & v1.1 and then the Virtual Center component. VirtualCenter relies on a database backend, and I thought it’d be interesting to look at the tables through MSSQL, although Oracle, Access and some generic ODBC are also options for this ancient version of VirtualCenter.
For those who don’t know, VirtualCenter is the application that lets you build a ‘virtual datacenter’ join multiple ESX servers together, and more importantly orchestrate them together into a cluster, allowing you to vMotion VMs between servers, which of course is the ‘killer feature’ of VMware ESX. If you don’t have vCenter / VirtualCenter then you are missing out on so much of the products capabilities, which is sadly hidden away.
I setup a tiny Windows NT 4.0 domain, with a domain controller, and a terminal server. My host machine is a bit weak to setup more ESX hosts, as there just isn’t enough punch in the box. Although any modern machine will probably exhaust RAM before CPU running a mid 90’s workload.
Back in the day, I had moved our entire DC onto 4 ‘killer’ machines with fiber channel storage and had consolidated the entire DC to a single cabinet. It was incredible that we were initially able to almost meet existing performance. Of course the killer feature again is vMotion so a year later, I only needed 4 new servers which was an easy budget ask, and in the middle of the day I vmotioned from the old servers into the new servers, and things across the board were now faster. Finally the bean counters saw the light that we didn’t have to buy faster gear for a single group, or that we no longer had the issues where we had ‘important enough’ to be in the data center but with no hardware maintenance, or proper backups. Now everyone is on equal footing and all the boats raised with the tide so to speak.
In this quick re-visitation it would be fun to setup shared storage, multiple hosts and vMotion, but back in the days of ESX 2.5 there was no support for having VMFS over NFS or iSCSI. As much as I’d love to use the Dr Dobbs iSCSI Target Emulator, it just sadly isn’t an option. The ability to move beyond Fiber Channel shared storage (or other supported dedicated host bus adapters) was added in version 3, greatly expanding the capabilities of ESX.
Obviously the career mistake here was to be a happy Admin, and concentrate on other things as now the infrastructure ‘just worked’ and it freed up an extraordinary amount of time. The smarter people were either taking these types of experiences and turning it into a consultation gig (low effort) , or taking lessons learned in VMware space, and focusing them onto QEMU/KVM and building libre infrastructure (high effort).
Such is life, be careful riding those trendy waves, eventually you have to either lead, follow or just get out of the way.
I’ve been pretty dismayed for the longest while that newer versions of Windows bundle newer versions of ODBC that refuse to talk to any version of SQL Server prior to 2000 (at the moment). Of course if I were ‘professional‘ Id be upgraded to the latest version, maybe even running on Linux. But I’m not, and you didn’t come here for how to upgrade/update but rather how can you use tools from the 90’s in the 10’s.
If you try to use the current SQL Server driver, you’ll get this message. Don’t be fooled, SQL Server 7.0 isn’t supported either (probably because of the SUN vs Microsoft Java debacle), it will only work with SQL Server 2000 or later versions.
SQL Server version 6.5 and all previous versions are no longer supported
It’s been this way since Windows 7, and I’ve just given up and gotten used to having to have a VM to access older databases. That is, until today.
While I was dumping data and moving stuff for my blog (something I need to write about another BCP adventure), I wanted to do a simple Access database to make sure it’s looking sane. And I figured I’d jump down to Windows 95, and load up Office 95. Well sure enough there was no proper SQL Server ODBC driver. Popping in the SQL Server 6.5 CD, naturally there is no ODBC drivers for Windows 95, but rather a 16bit driver for Windows 3.1, and 32bit drivers for Windows NT. I installed the NT version, and was still unable to connect until I installed the SQL client which then let me run WINDBVER.EXE so I could configure the appropriate transport DLL (TCP/IP) and then I could connect.
Access 95 using the SQL 6.5 NT ODBC Driver + Client
And this got me thinking, is it possible to just take those DLL’s and move them onto Windows 10? Well naturally that won’t work as the driver sqlsrv32.dll is a system protected file, and you can’t overwrite it without a lot of pain. However this got me to thinking that it should be possible to just tell the system it’s a new driver with a different name.
Looking through the registry I notice that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\ODBC is where the 32bit ODBC stuff is stored, so this is where I’ll make my ‘OLD SQL’ driver. I simply used the existing one and renamed the driver/setup DLL’s to sql65-sqlsrv32.dll so that way the 2 DLL’s can co-exist without freaking out.
OLD SQL Driver
With that done, the key Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers will need a new SZ string saying the ‘OLD SQL’ driver is installed.
Add the new driver to the available list.
I also copied the following files from the SQL 6.5 client into a subdirectory of SysWOW64 so I could configure the transport:
Now if you are going to use named pipes it’ll just work out of the box. Running WINDBVER you’ll see that it’s set that way by default.
Named pipes, and notice it’s version 8.0.1.85 from 2016!
to change it to TCP/IP I coped the files DBMSSOC3.DLL & DBMSSOCN.DLL into the SysWOW64 directory and re-ran WINDBVER, and then selected TCP/IP.
TCP/IP via DBMSSOCN.DLL
Now we can go ahead and add a SQL DSN. Remember to use the 32-bit ODBC Data Source tool
Note this is the 32-bit version!
If everything is setup correctly you should see the ‘OLD SQL’ Database driver. Scrolling to the right you’ll see that it’s version 2.65.02.01 dated 7/7/1997
Use the ‘OLD SQL’ driver
Now we just need to configured the driver. Be sure to hit the Options button and type in the database name, otherwise it’ll just go to the default database. Since I’m just using the ‘sa’ user that would be the master database, but I want Access to instead use the ‘pubs’ database.
Configure the old driver
Sadly these old drivers don’t have any test functionality. So there is no real way to know if it is working at this point, however I would imagine it should as we have added a regsitery key for the driver, added it to the available driver list, selected (if needed) a transport DLL, and populated the needed fields. The next thing to do is to try to use it.
The ODBC option is in the ‘Other’ sources now.
Start Access, and select a blank database. Go to the External Data tab, and then choose the New Data Source, and the From Other Sources option. This will bring up the ODBC database wizard.
Link to the data source
I’m going with linked, as I want the data to be used from the SQL Server all of the time. You will be then prompted to choose the Data Source
The dbtest ODBC connection should be under the Machine listings
You can select the DSN we setup earlier, and then it’ll prompt you to login.
Login to the SQL Server
Again I’m using SA because… why not. And now for the moment of truth, if everything is correct you’ll be presented with the list of tables! This means that it’s working!
The pubs database from SQL 4.21
You can choose to save the password, and if needed select unique fields, or just leave it as it is. Now you should be able to access your SQL 4.21 database!
The Authors table from the pubs database
And there we have it.
If anyone is brave/crazy enough I extracted the driver here: sql65odbc-files.7z SQL Server 6.5 should not only be able to access 4.21, and 6.0 but I think it ought to be able to access SQL Server 7.0, although I haven’t tested it out yet.
Yes, I know this is crazy but… I don’t know if anyone else would care. Windows 10 (7 & 8 as well, I guess…) include a .NET 2.0 option or a 3.5 which includes 2.0 install but if you need the first real ‘release’ version of .NET v1.1 you cannot install it. And some applications were pretty much hard coded to 1.1, even though the whole point of .NET was to avoid this kind of version/DLL hell.
.NET 1.1 setup From here it’s all failure.
Well I had come across this great post here on techjourney.net. And yes it sounds crazy but it works!
All you need to do is download the version 1.1 framework + SP 1, and slipstream the SP 1 patch into the directory and run the setup..
I’ve gone ahead and combined the .NET v1.1 framework + SP1 into this zip file: dotnet1.1-withsp1.zip, so you can bypass those steps, and just go. No more bizare errors about the debugger not finding itself and crashing out the installer.
VMware VirtualCenter on Windows 10
And now I can manage my nested VMware ESX 2.5.2 cluster on Windows 10 natively as managing from a VM just wasn’t the great experience I’d been hoping for.
Well it turns out that by turning on all the SDK stuff for Windows 10, including the mobile dev, which includes the Windows phone emulator it naturally uses Hyper-V.
Hyper-V Hypervisor enabled
And obviously the two hypervisor’s wont play nice with each-other. You could just disable it, and go back and forth re-enabling it when needed, or make a new boot selection without it!
C:\> bcdedit /copy {current} /d "No Hyper-V"
The entry was successfully copied to {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea}.
C:\> bcdedit /set {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea} hypervisorlaunchtype off
The operation completed successfully.
note: The ID generated from the first command is what you use in the second one. Don’t just run it verbatim.
When you restart, you’ll then just see a menu with two options…
Windows 10
No Hyper-V
Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?
BCD Boot menu
And just like that on power up, I can switch between Hyper-v and no Hyper-V.
Oh yeah with the latest version of Windows 10 (October 2018) I had to list the BCD table with:
bcdedit /enum ACTIVE /v
As after the upgrade it had tagged both of my boot selections to enable Hyper-V everywhere. I had to delete the #2 entry and re-create the no hyperv dance. {current} doesn’t work anymore.
There was a shift years ago from the old help system that has it’s roots going back to Windows 3.0, and was certainly one of the killer features of Windows 3.0, the hyperlinked and searchable help files. They were a form of compiled RTF files, and could also embed image resources, and later audio & video with the evolution of Windows. This allowed for a platform for early multimedia encylopedias and other refrence books of sorts.
Starting with Windows Vista, however the WinHelp engine was being retired out for a CHM or compiled HTML help engine. And for a whlie there optional updates and later downloads to re-enable WinHelp. However starting with Windows 10 the downloads no longer work.
All is not lost however, if you copy any of the 32bit WinHelp programs from NT 3.1 onward it will still function on Windows 10. And thanks to this great post on TenForums, you can re-enable the hook so that Windows 10 will integrate again with WinHelp.
@echo off
set crtpth=%CD%
takeown /f "%windir%\winhlp32.exe" >nul
icacls "%windir%\winhlp32.exe" /grant *S-1-5-32-544:F >nul
copy /y "%crtpth%\winhlp32.exe" %windir%
icacls "%windir%\winhlp32.exe" /setowner "NT Service\TrustedInstaller" >nul
echo.
echo Done.
echo.
echo Press any key to Exit
pause >nul
WinHelp from Windows NT 3.1 refresh on Windows 10
And there we go, now I can load obsolete refrence docs from great old programs like Visual C++ 1.10 for Windows NT!
Naturally Microsoft removed all this stuff as it was a security risk, in that they apparently never revamped or updated it, so yeah it may be another infection vector.
This is super cool, building on Takeda Toshiya’s excellent MS-DOS Player, is a fusion of the MS-DOS emulation with portions of Wine to run Win16 applications on Win32 capable OS’s.
Excel 3.0a
Yes, it really can run Excel 3.0a. I don’t know how much people will want a 27 year old spreadsheet, but here we go! It’s incredibly buggy, and many Microsoft programs don’t like their accelerators, or menus, more things don’t run than do, but when they do it’s great.
The releases on the github page are quite old, and you’ll really want to bulid this from source. You will need Visual Studio 2017 to build this, and I used the Community Edition. While trying to compiling I got this error:
Really it’s no help at all
Performing Custom Build Tools
The system cannot find the path specified.
Well that doesn’t help us at all!
Setting the Tools -> Options -> Build and Run, MSBuild sections to both detailed verbosity revealed:
“C:\Users\neozeed\source\repos\winevdm-master\Release\convspec” “krnl386.exe16.spec” KERNEL > “krnl386.exe16.asm” && “C:\msys32\mingw64\bin\as” –32 -o “krnl386.exe16.obj” “krnl386.exe16.asm”
Performing Custom Build Tools
The system cannot find the path specified.
So it turns out it is using GNU GAS to assemble itself. So I just copied in an ‘as.exe’ from another MinGW install I have lying around.
c:\msys32\mingw64\bin\as.exe –version
GNU assembler 2.17.50 20060824
So it doesn’t even have to be a hyper modern version, as you can see with the –32 we are building 32bit based stuff anyways.
And with that all done we have a release build.
F2c Dungeon
I had no luck with Sim City, but Sim Life & Sim Earth load at least, but not being able to use the menus means you can’t really use them. Microsoft Word 1.1 won’t load at all, while Word 2.0 will load but again no menus, and it’s unable to register enough OLE to open documents so it’s not very useful again. Although my ancient QuickC for Windows F2c port of Dungeon, works okay, although QuickC for Windows itself does not currently run.
WinHelp 3.00
Another great thing is that you can run WinHelp for all your ancient documenation fixes! Also MS Write from the ancient days of Windows 3.0/3.1 works as well
The latest version allows the menus to work properly so you can actually use Word for Windows 2.0 and SimEarth & SimLife now! Further updates let you actually select and open files in Word for Windows 2.0!
So while cruising the junk market in Hong Kong I found this little ‘roomba’ looking machine. Looks pretty neat, and because it has video & crashing issues I was able to get this thing for $500 HKD or about $75. I mostly felt bad for the guy as the disk had died in the thing, and he had spent the money to get a SSD into this thing, and had been nice enough to upgrade the Windows 7 to Windows 8, and onward to Windows 10 for me, all legit.
But to start the adventure what the heck is this thing? Naturally SONY has several things that look like model numbers. Normally I’d just flip it on it’s back and reveal..
SONY VGX-TP3G underside
A model of PCG-2G2P. However looking at it’s side I find…
SONY VGX-TP3G side view
That this thing is also a VGX-TP3G. Way to complicate things SONY!
So searching SONY seems kind of funny as it bounces me to America first for some reason, then tells me to go to the APAC site.
GOTO APAC!
I don’t know why these kinds of ‘main corp, but not really main corp’ companies drive me crazy. And wouldn’t you know it, no manuals, and the downloads are only for the SONY applications built in for BlueRay playback that aren’t on the SD.
And then I find this fun support article, 00188888.
Dear Valued Customers,
Please be informed that Sony’s support has ended for VAIO computers which were shipped with the following Microsoft Windows operating systems preinstalled:
•        Windows 95
•        Windows 98
•        Windows 98 SE
•        Windows ME
•        Windows 2000
•        Windows XP
•        Windows Vista
As of March 1, 2018, we will no longer provide drivers and software for download for these computers.
That’s right! Even though they already offer no drivers, BIOS updates or anything they will kill all downloads for all the older machines in less than 2 weeks. Great. So avoid any old SONY salvage guys.
So I decide I’m going to wipe the machine, and re-install Windows with the x64 variant, and I also wanted it in English. The OS installs just fine, and everything looks good. Even though this is a 10 year old machine, I thought I’d try something simple, like compiling a Linux kernel, and that is when I saw the weirdest thing. While unzipping the archive, the disk usage hit 100%, but there was no blinking on the disk LED (this machine is so old, it has one of those things!), and in the task manager, no program was using the disk at all.
So a quick search led me to this article, 3083595.
Task Manager might show 100% disk utilization on Windows 10 devices with Message Signaled Interrupt (MSI) mode enabled
Symptoms
Task Manager shows the disk to be at 100% utilization despite a light or no workload, and the system may experience lag or become unresponsive. In addition, the system event log contains numerous events with Event ID 129, which represent resets of the disk controller.
While device resets can be caused by a varying number of factors, we are aware of issues with some Advanced Host Controller Interface PCI-Express(AHCI PCIe) models that causes these symptoms in Windows 10 when running with the inbox StorAHCI.sys driver. Due to a firmware bug, the Solid-state drive (SSD) does not properly complete input/output when Message Signaled Interrupt (MSI) mode is enabled. As a result, the Windows storage stack attempts to reset the device after waiting on unresponsive reads or writes for a period of time.
I loaded up Kerbal Space Program, but it’s ancient Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T8300 & NVIDIA® GeForce® 8400M GT GPU really show their age. But it does run, so that is nice. It runs Edge & YouTube just fine, and handles all the general media stuff I wanted so that’s a win for me.
So I have to setup a new machine for someone, and going the VMWare route for some essential bits (Running ESXi) it turns out that every VM I try to run gives me this fun error 1036521.
What the heck is this? It sure could have been made a little more legible but it means that your BIOS needs to have the hardware assist turned on for virtualization. This kind of thing just reminds me so much of OS/2 and it’s SYSXXXX errors from back in the day.
Speaking of, once VMWare was running the display was incredibly tiny. This image really doesn’t do it justice, but it’s frankly impossible to read.
What is this? An emulator for ants?
There isn’t much in the way of help for VMWare Player (aka freeloader) version users, however some playing around and I found an acceptable solution.
All too easy, of course once you know where to look
Simply find the shortcut’s location and jump to the compatibility tab, and set the “Override high DPI scaling to “System (Enhanced)”, hit OK and you are now good to go!
VMWare for humans
Now you can actually read what is going on. Also for anyone who cares, MS OS/2 1.21 really should be on a 100MB disk or so.. large disks & VMWare’s IDE don’t play along so well.
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